{
  "generatedAt": "2026-10-08T17:44:57Z",
  "disclaimer": "Analysis and opinion, not investment advice.",
  "kind": "person",
  "slug": "michael-spencer",
  "name": "Michael Spencer",
  "role": null,
  "url": "https://deepstack.ltd/people/michael-spencer/",
  "api": "https://deepstack.ltd/api/v1/entities/people/michael-spencer.json",
  "summary": "Michael Spencer appears in Part 5, Part 6, Part 9, Part 10 of The Buildout. Part 5: OpenAI and Anthropic Are Not the Same Business; Part 6: Power Doesn’t Depreciate. Its Premium Moves.; Part 9: Habit Was the Moat. Agents Are Draining It.; Part 10: The Bubble Is in the Denominator. Argued in Part 5 (Anthropic: not yet), Part 5 (OpenAI: commoditized), Part 5 (Voices that cross sides), Part 9 (Still a demo), Part 9 (The owner of the agent), Part 10 (Not the customers, yet).",
  "parts": [
    {
      "part": 5,
      "headline": "OpenAI and Anthropic Are Not the Same Business",
      "url": "https://deepstack.ltd/stories/anthropic-grew-142-percent-openai/"
    },
    {
      "part": 6,
      "headline": "Power Doesn’t Depreciate. Its Premium Moves.",
      "url": "https://deepstack.ltd/stories/power-doesnt-depreciate/"
    },
    {
      "part": 9,
      "headline": "Habit Was the Moat. Agents Are Draining It.",
      "url": "https://deepstack.ltd/stories/habit-was-the-moat/"
    },
    {
      "part": 10,
      "headline": "The Bubble Is in the Denominator",
      "url": "https://deepstack.ltd/stories/the-bubble-is-in-the-denominator/"
    }
  ],
  "numbers": [
    {
      "value": "$559M",
      "label": "Anthropic adjusted income",
      "context": "Michael Spencer; preliminary June quarter 2026",
      "part": 5,
      "url": "https://deepstack.ltd/stories/anthropic-grew-142-percent-openai/"
    }
  ],
  "mentions": [
    {
      "part": 5,
      "section": "Lede",
      "excerpt": "The slow laboratory went from $5.7bn to $6.7bn, according to Michael Spencer; Anthropic reached $11.6bn.",
      "url": "https://deepstack.ltd/stories/anthropic-grew-142-percent-openai/"
    },
    {
      "part": 5,
      "section": "The pair breaks",
      "excerpt": "Michael Spencer reports an 80 percent cut to GPT-5.6 Lune, with routing layers and code wrappers steering work toward cheaper Chinese models.",
      "url": "https://deepstack.ltd/stories/anthropic-grew-142-percent-openai/"
    },
    {
      "part": 6,
      "section": "Politics sets the price",
      "excerpt": "Michael Spencer relays polling that puts opposition to large data centers near people’s homes at 70% to 75%, with more than half of Americans supporting a national moratorium.",
      "url": "https://deepstack.ltd/stories/power-doesnt-depreciate/"
    },
    {
      "part": 9,
      "section": "The first bill",
      "excerpt": "Michael Spencer, who covers the AI industry daily, expects about 1 million users by November, doubts the ratio of downloads to users and warns that Muse’s compute bill could crater Meta’s free cash flow in 2027.",
      "url": "https://deepstack.ltd/stories/habit-was-the-moat/"
    },
    {
      "part": 10,
      "section": "Who writes the checks",
      "excerpt": "Michael Spencer adds a price warning: Ramp’s index showed what customers pay per million tokens down 41% from its March peak, to $0.68.",
      "url": "https://deepstack.ltd/stories/the-bubble-is-in-the-denominator/"
    }
  ],
  "sides": [
    {
      "part": 5,
      "question": null,
      "side": "openai-commoditized",
      "sideLabel": "OpenAI: commoditized",
      "claim": "OpenAI grew revenue only about 18% quarter over quarter in Q2 2026 (from $5.7B to $6.7B), while Anthropic grew 142% quarter over quarter to $11.6B, showing OpenAI is slowing at the worst possible time just before its IPO.",
      "date": "2026-08-20",
      "url": "https://www.ai-supremacy.com/p/we-have-never-seen-an-anthropic-before-2026-revenue-ipo",
      "linkVerified": true,
      "storyUrl": "https://deepstack.ltd/stories/anthropic-grew-142-percent-openai/",
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    },
    {
      "part": 5,
      "question": null,
      "side": "openai-commoditized",
      "sideLabel": "OpenAI: commoditized",
      "claim": "Anthropic reported preliminary Q2 revenue of $11.5 billion and a projected adjusted operating profit of $559 million, and by the time it goes public it will be comfortably profitable, unlike SpaceX which spent $18.37 billion in capex against just…",
      "date": "2026-08-20",
      "url": "https://www.ai-supremacy.com/p/we-have-never-seen-an-anthropic-before-2026-revenue-ipo",
      "linkVerified": true,
      "storyUrl": "https://deepstack.ltd/stories/anthropic-grew-142-percent-openai/",
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    },
    {
      "part": 5,
      "question": null,
      "side": "anthropic-not-yet",
      "sideLabel": "Anthropic: not yet",
      "claim": "Anthropic's ARR grew from approximately $700 million in August 2024 to its current level, a roughly 93x increase in about two years.",
      "date": "2026-08-20",
      "url": "https://www.ai-supremacy.com/p/we-have-never-seen-an-anthropic-before-2026-revenue-ipo",
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      "question": null,
      "side": "anthropic-not-yet",
      "sideLabel": "Anthropic: not yet",
      "claim": "Cognition's Devin achieved a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate and a $40 billion valuation in under two years, making it exceptional among AI startups for this pace of revenue growth.",
      "date": "2026-08-20",
      "url": "https://www.ai-supremacy.com/p/visions-of-ai-automating-repetitive-grunt-coding-tasks-2026-devin",
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      "question": null,
      "side": "crossing",
      "sideLabel": "Voices that cross sides",
      "claim": "As Devin and similar tools scale, they drive increased token usage of Anthropic's models, creating a compounding benefit to Anthropic.",
      "date": "2026-08-20",
      "url": "https://www.ai-supremacy.com/p/visions-of-ai-automating-repetitive-grunt-coding-tasks-2026-devin",
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    {
      "part": 5,
      "question": null,
      "side": "crossing",
      "sideLabel": "Voices that cross sides",
      "claim": "Europe's dream of sovereign AI leadership is fading because Mistral, despite raising 3.5 billion dollars at a 21 billion euro valuation, has been unable to compete with the United States or China in open-source AI models.",
      "date": "2026-09-10",
      "url": "https://www.ai-supremacy.com/p/ai-reality-european-sovereign-ai-is-dying-mistral-series-d",
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      "storyUrl": "https://deepstack.ltd/stories/anthropic-grew-142-percent-openai/",
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      "side": "still-a-demo",
      "sideLabel": "Still a demo",
      "claim": "Since Meta Muse optimizes how consumers clean up digital subscriptions they no longer care about, at scale it could implode subscriptions and accelerate subscription fatigue further in 2027, significantly hurting independent media providers such as…",
      "date": "2026-09-29",
      "url": "https://www.ai-supremacy.com/p/the-era-of-personal-super-intelligent-agents-muse-2026",
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      "side": "still-a-demo",
      "sideLabel": "Still a demo",
      "claim": "Since Muse's release, it is claimed that consumers who gave the AI access to banking and credit card statements found it to be a great budgeting coach, leading them to cancel unnecessary subscriptions, and the creator expects a huge subscription…",
      "date": "2026-09-29",
      "url": "https://www.ai-supremacy.com/p/the-era-of-personal-super-intelligent-agents-muse-2026",
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      "question": "who-collects",
      "side": "owner-of-the-agent",
      "sideLabel": "The owner of the agent",
      "claim": "Generative AI's impact on the macro economy and labor market is a serious concern: higher inflation, less hiring, more anxiety, and a lack of ROI compared to the debt, capex and resulting AI bubble, with higher earnings masking dangerous…",
      "date": "2026-09-08",
      "url": "https://www.ai-supremacy.com/p/gpt-6-astra-hugging-face-incident-2026-review",
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      "claim": "The creator is not sure a future AI monopoly warning about human-extinction risk will be well received given how unpopular AI and Silicon Valley currently are in America, Europe and elsewhere, and says more will be known once there is more data on…",
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      "claim": "The creator reads declining frontier model usage as a sign that enterprises, startups and power users are becoming more price conscious even as token prices fall, citing Ramp's index showing effective price per million tokens down 41% to $0.68 from…",
      "date": "2026-09-11",
      "url": "https://www.ai-supremacy.com/p/ai-insights-is-ai-adoption-slowing-down-ai-risk-debate",
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      "sideLabel": "Not the customers, yet",
      "claim": "A lot of the tasks agents are being asked to do won't translate into real economic value, despite requiring massive compute, which is actually how the entire AI thesis could break given the debt behind the AI infrastructure build-out.",
      "date": "2026-10-01",
      "url": "https://www.ai-supremacy.com/p/ai-frontier-google-gemini-4-argon",
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